Sep 25 - Top German Academic Publishes Article On Gibraltarian Author M. G. Sanchez
Professor Ina Habermann, Head of Basel University’s English Department and a specialist in spatial studies and cultural theory, has just published an article on Gibraltarian author M. G. Sanchez.
Professor Habermann was the Director of the Centre of Competence Cultural Topographies from 2008 to 2017, and is the author of various scholarly monographs – including Staging Slander and Gender in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2003) and Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow: Priestley, du Maurier and the Symbolic Form of Englishness (Palgrave 2010).
Last year the Professor delivered two academic presentations on Gibraltar – a talk entitled ‘Britain and Gibraltar’ at the University of Portsmouth, and a keynote lecture for the ‘Spaces of Entanglement - Negotiating European Crossroads’ conference at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.
She is also scheduled to deliver a paper entitled ‘Gibraltarian Hauntologies in the Fiction of M. G. Sanchez’ later this year at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle.
Her latest article - “British-European Entanglements: M.G. Sanchez’ The Escape Artist and the Case of Gibraltar” – has appeared in the Autumn edition of the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings, an academic periodical published by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
In her article, Professor Habermann describes Sanchez ‘as the writer who, both in his fiction and non-fiction, has most deeply and subtly explored the Gibraltarian predicament’.
The Professor praises Sanchez’s representations of Gibraltarian cultural hybridity, arguing that there are echoes in his work of postcolonial writers such as Sam Selvon or V. S. Naipaul.
She also maintains that it precisely this sense of cosmopolitanism and cultural hybridity – what she describes as Gibraltar’s ‘lived Europeanness’ - that makes the Rock a model for emulation in these politically testing times:
“In the intrinsically racist language of ethnic and national purity … Gibraltar is an anomaly; it should cease to exist.… Once cultural hybridity is embraced, however, acknowledging the existence, and the rights of a culture and society which have evolved over hundreds of years, there is a place for Gibraltar, preferably as part of a united Europe. In this respect, Gibraltar could even be ahead of the queue, providing an example of lived Europeanness. However, the wind is currently blowing from a different direction. Instead of celebrating the union, nation states, and most of all Britain, are seeking to disentangle themselves from it.”
The whole of Professor Habermann’s article can be read on this link:
http://www.jlic.be/doku.php?id=spaces_of_entanglement
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